Believing the Gospel
Ultimately your life centers around one and only one thing – your response to the message of the gospel. At the end of your life many of the things that we spend our lives focusing on will prove to be empty. Your family, intelligence, education, wealth, race, failures, successes, and dreams are all eclipsed by the one reality that really matters. What is your response to the news about Jesus Christ?
We believe that your answer to that question is the most important thing for you to consider today. The Bible teaches that we are all sinners (Romans 3:23) – rebels against God, enemies of God, men and women who live our lives trying to escape God. Because of our rebellion we each suffer the consequences: hopelessness, emptiness, isolation from others and from God, and ultimately death…physically and spiritually (Romans 6:23). Spiritual death is by far the worst of all sin’s consequences. It means spending forever separated from God and thus separated from all happiness, joy, and peace. Additionally it means to suffer God’s judgement forever. The name that is given to that unending punishment is Hell.
That is really bad news and it gets worse. Each person on earth faces that future. We are all sinners. No one is exempt, and no one can save themselves. It is impossible for any of us to do enough good things to pull ourselves out of the hole that we find ourselves in. Looking at ourselves we find our present and our future to be hopeless.
But that’s where the gospel – the good news – steps in.
God loves the world. God loves people. In spite of themselves, God loves men and women, even though they have disobeyed him, rebelled against him, and spent their energy running from him. God loves people so much that even though they were unable to save themselves, he stepped into history and secured a rescue for all who would come to him (John 3:16).
God became a man – Jesus. He lived a perfect life. He lived the life that each of us should have lived. He was absolutely perfect, sinless. He spent several years as an adult teaching people what God was like, showing them what God was up to, and then remarkably he died to save sinners. Jesus lived the life that we should have lived, and he died the death that we should have died. He was crucified on a Roman cross and in that moment he died as a substitute for sinners – receiving the judgment, condemnation, and punishment that they should receive. The story doesn’t end there though. The Bible tells us that three days later Jesus came back to life and because of that death and resurrection he is able to save all those who trust him.
That is really good news. Yet it is only good news for us if we are connected to it. So how does that happen? How can you and I be connected to the good news of God’s rescue? The Bible tells us that the only way is to recognize our desperate need for Jesus and to respond by believing in Jesus. Each of us must acknowledge that we are a sinner. We are in a hopeless and helpless condition. We must repent (or turn away from) that bondage to sin and turn to Jesus. We must believe that he is who he said he is, that he died for us, and that three days later he came back to life. We must ask him to forgive us, to rescue us, and then we must submit to him being the ruler of our lives. That submission involves trusting Jesus to do what he said he would do, obeying Jesus, and confessing Jesus before others.
That is how a sinner is rescued by Jesus. That is the good news of the gospel, and your response to that message is the only thing that truly matters. We hope that you believe the gospel. If you do, if you trust Jesus and have submitted your life to him, then we hope you will share that with a local church and connect yourself to other rescued sinners who are seeking to grow and mature together as followers of Jesus.
If you would like to talk about believing the gospel, connecting to a church, or any other question about what all this means, we would love to hear from you. Send us an email, call us, or join us for one of our small group studies or worship services. We would love to sit down and talk about the most important news in the world.